In order to attend the victims, the government opened more than 300 shelters using public buildings, expropriated houses, schools, hotels, military barracks and even the palace of Miraflores where Chávez received several families. In fact, this situation helped the Commander and the Bolivarian government launch a set of emergency laws for the protection of the people, and with them a whole public policy of assistance.
But in the midst of the contingency, on December 8, President Chávez visited the peasant town of Santa Rosa de Lima in the State of Zulia. When he arrived, he was immediately approached by a group of men and women impacted by the disaster and desperate in the face of uncertainty. While the Commander plunged his boots into the mud and walked through Santa Rosa, the people were thrilled by Chávez’s personal presence, but also by the need to confront him and denounce the government’s failures and abandonment. Chávez patiently listened, accepted criticism and scolding respectfully and grasped the calamity that overwhelmed its inhabitants, not only as a consequence of the rains, but also because of the degree of misery and misfortune that engulfed them.
During the tour, Chávez confirmed once again the nefarious consequences of the latifundio, which concentrates hundreds of thousands of hectares of land in the hands of a handful of families, while millions of people succumb in the face of dispossession and misery. The indignation did not exonerate Chávez, who was in pursuit of a radical solution to the problem that appeared before his eyes: “We are evaluating the situation to strengthen support and recover all that needs to be recovered. This is a social revolution and we have to give the land to the peasant, the earth for the peasant to work, not for the landowner,” he exclaimed through the megaphone as he walked alongside the people.
That same day, in the evening hours, Chávez ordered the recovery of forty-three of the most ostentatious latifundios in the southern zone of the lake, initiating a new liberating cycle, but no less torturous in the struggle against the latifundio that years before had begun with the expropriation of vast tracts of land and the setting in motion of hundreds of experiments in agricultural production.
In this issue of Chávez Radical, we want to present the praxis, understood as symbiosis between thought and action, developed by the Commander around the problem of land and the Venezuelan agrarian question. He begins by criticizing the Adeca agrarian reform of 1960, which ended up deceiving the peasantry because it ended up by being “destined to strengthen the old latifundia even more” and contributed to creating “new latifundia”, assimilating the reform as a continuation of the nefarious latifundia practice of José Antonio Páez, who was known to distribute land to soldiers and then, faced with the difficulties of sustaining it, buy it from them at the prices of a scrawny hen, becoming the most famous terrófago (landowner) of the 19th century.
Chávez then denounced the emergence of a new social class based on the theft of land from poor peasants; a class of new rich forged in the heat of corruption and institutional protection, while the Venezuelan countryside was devastated by the peasant exodus from the oil boom and the entire agrarian policy that deepened inequality, misery, hunger, illiteracy and disease in the Venezuelan countryside.
At the same time, Chávez addressed the problem of property, since “the land property regime determines the political and administrative regime of every nation,” for which he proposed “changing the feudal property regime for the socialist property regime, that not only guarantees the overcoming of latifundia and servitude as the features of feudalism that still survive, but that allows the exercise of social property, understood as the property of all, as brothers and sisters in balance with the ecosystems, as a radical solution to the Venezuelan agrarian problem.
The Commander accompanied all these valuable reflections with consistent government action that led to the recovery of important tracts of land, to free thousands of people who remained invisible in the Venezuelan countryside from slavery and servility; as well as the development of a whole policy of investment and agrarian development, credits and financing, agricultural road development, seed production, control of agro-inputs production and distribution chains, technology and mechanization, research, training and dignification of peasant life, which resulted in great economic and social successes for the population. Although it must be recognized that it was not immune to errors, failures and deviations that resulted in the failure of some of these projects, which ended up imposing bureaucratic perversity in institutional management, corruption, waste and collusion with private business sectors, which not only adapted to the new situations and gambled on the failure of the agrarian policy of the Bolivarian government, but in many cases resulted in closer alliances with senior government officials who became businessmen thanks to their connections with institutional funding sources.
This process also seriously damaged the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, provoking a counterrevolutionary onslaught that, among other things, produced the coup d’état of 2002 and the murder of hundreds of peasants at the hands of gangs of hired killers and paramilitaries who were paid by the landowners who lost their lands and today are seeking their recovery through a government policy that privileges the traditional business sectors to the detriment of the peasantry that Chávez honoured with his entire agrarian policy.
The threat against the peasantry that received their land in Chávez’s time is still ongoing and has claimed the lives of 17 peasants in the last two years. This peasant movement denounces, the return of land to former landowners, the transfer of foreign exchange and financing to business sectors in the name of strategic alliances, and the development of the productive forces under a capitalist model.
As peasant leader Nieves Rios stated, we are in a process of clear retreat, in which Chávez’s agrarian project is under attack. Let this material serve as an incentive for debate and to resume the Radical Commander Chávez’s path.
Sources
08/12/2010. Intervención del Comandante Presidente Hugo Chávez durante visita al Sur del Lago de Maracaibo.
07/11/2007. Inspección al Fundo Tacarigua II en tierras rescatadas del Eje Socialista Valle de los Tacariguas
06/08/2006. Aló Presidente N° 259. Estado Bolívar.
23/08/2009. Aló Presidente N° 338. Estado Apure
Tatuy Tv: Mayra Soto, Joshua Wilson, María Reyes y Juan Lenzo.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
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